Rabbit's Warren

My standard text editor is Vim (now 8.X). When Vim is set up correctly for my language environment, it is a reliable workhorse that does pretty much what I want.

However, there is one glitch I have run across more than once: I open a text file in the usual way, and Vim insists that it is read only, despite any and all tricks I try to turn back into a regular writeable file.

Today, however, I noticed that the read-only file had what Vim calls an “illegal byte” in it. My understand is that this is a byte appearing in a string which Vim is unable to interpret using the fileencoding it is set for. People who mess with Chinese in more than once flavor (Big-5, GB, Hong Kong etc) can easily run into this situation. I noticed this because “illegal byte” appeared in Vim’s status line, including the line number. Despite the hint, however, “illegal bytes” are sometimes hard to spot: look for a question mark where there shouldn’t be one.

It seems that an illegal byte is at least one cause for a file to persistently open in read-only mode. Get rid of the cursed thing and save the file using -w! This resolved my problem for several files.

A new computer running windows 10 and lots of updated software, what more can you ask for? A bottle of aspirin to go with it.

The headache today is perhaps not the fault of windows 10. It is due to the general drift in computer operating systems toward screwing down permissions until the user begs for mercy. To this drift, windows 10 has given a hard, vigorous push.

The primary responsibility for my headache, however, is with the Xampp control panel. Xampp is a handy multi-platform version of a LAMP distro: Linux-Apache-Mysql-PHP. Xampp is now my daily bread and butter. Without it, I would have trouble running my weekly class assignments. In addition, I have decades of research in my database tables; I would probably jump off the humanities building if I lost these.

Because it has been so important, I have been very slow to update Xampp. Having spent bucks on a new computer, however, it was necessary to update in order to get my money’s worth out of it all. The headache began when I finally installed a recent version of Xampp and immediately started getting error messages, just by turning Apache and Mysql (actually now MariaDB) on and off.

For the message, see the title of this note. If you search for this on google, there are over 100,000 hits, so I’m not the only one who got bit by this.

The secret to fixing this bug is to put a shortcut on the windows desktop that is configured to run as admin. This may actually be asking for trouble, but whatever it takes. The Xampp control panel does important things like installs apache as a service and so on. I guess that is the reason the control panel now requires you to be a superuser to fiddle with it.

It still strikes me as an unnecessary bother; it was also undocumented in the version of Xampp I installed. Not very user-friendly: the first thing new software does after you install it is give you an error message.